I will be joining a bunch of “friendly cypherpunks” this Saturday in Adelaide where ordinary people interested in protecting their privacy can learn the basic tools that will make their computer more secure. It’s a community service, it’s free and it will probably be quite fun if you are into that sort of thing 🙂

Hope to see you there x (Details are in the link in the previous paragraph)

On Friday I wrote an Opinion piece for The Age based on an earlier blog about why I think Australia’s proposed data retention laws are not only an invasion of privacy, they are an expensive measure that simply won’t work. Today The Age ran a longer journalistic piece about the laws.

This prompted a couple of tweets from the Twitter account that claims to represent the Australian arm of Anonymous:

Tweets by the group claiming to be the Australian arm of Anonymous

This is the same group who claimed responsibility for hacking ASIO earlier this year. Here’s the pastebin dump of ‘targets’ for hacking that they refer to in the tweets above:

Last month I published a piece in The Age about the ‘dark web’ – sites that can only be accessed through anonymity software.

The picture someone decided was totally appropriate and non-hysterical

What became lost beneath graphics of demons emerging from computers was a line I wrote in response to proposed legislative changes that could lead to the web history of any device connected to the internet being logged and retained for up to two years for law enforcement purposes:

“But such measures will have no effect on those who conduct their criminal activities on the Dark Web because nothing is logged — there is no history to keep. And some argue such measures will cause more people to seek out anonymity services — the same services that provide access to the Dark Web.”

In researching that article, I spoke to many people – university professors, a representative of Tor and law enforcement – who agreed that the measures proposed by Roxon are a ‘feel-good bandaid’ rather than an effective tool to catch criminals.